Rosita Forbes: the travel writer they couldn't tame

Rosita Forbes was a glamorous Englishwoman whose daring adventures across the
world are now all but forgotten

Rosita Forbes with a Rifle in October 1937Photo: Corbis

By Kamila Shamsie

4:00PM BST 22 Apr 2014

'Too much was given us. Far too much was asked of us… For myself, I found the necessary escape – from too much emotion, from so sensitive an awareness of the next world that the permissible conveniences of this one were ignored – in planning a career of adventure.” By the time Rosita Forbes came to write those words, in the first volume of her autobiography Gypsy in the Sun (1944), she had already passed from fame to notoriety and was on her way to the obscurity in which she remains bafflingly shrouded despite her extraordinary books of travel and adventure.

Born Joan Rosita Torr in 1890, she was married at 21, and within six years had provoked the first of her life’s many scandals by divorcing her husband, Colonel Robert Foster Forbes, pawning her wedding ring, and attempting to ride across South Africa on horseback. The authorities intervened, which taught her that in future it was best to travel below the radar of officialdom when it might get in the way of her intended expeditions. She returned to a Europe that was soon at war, and spent two years in France driving an ambulance at the Front before deciding the world had greater adventures to offer.

For a 13-month period from 1917 to 1918, Forbes and her friend Armorel Meinertzhagen travelled through more than 30 countries, mostly in Asia. A particular highlight was China, where they found themselves amid warlords. “We were both devoid of physical fear, which is a condition, not a quality,” she wrote. After the war, with just £40 to her name, Forbes made her way to the Paris peace conference, hoping to find work as a journalist, but when nothing came of this she and Meinertzhagen left for North Africa “with little money, but much ingenuity and… a growing faith in people and circumstances.”

The circumstance that transformed her life occurred when the intelligence officer Francis Rodd asked his Balliol friend Ahmed Mohammed Bey Hassanein if Rosita Forbes could accompany them both on their planned expedition to the Kufara Oasis in the Libyan Desert. By now Forbes, in the course of her travels and her writing, had developed an interest in Arab nationalism – it wouldn’t be surprising if the intelligence services thought of her as a potential Gertrude Bell, the English writer and spy who played an important role in creating modern Iraq. Somewhat predictably, given Forbes’s youth, gender and beauty, rumours were spread that she was having affairs with both Rodd and Hassanein.

In the end, Rodd was unable to take part and Forbes became only the second Westerner, and the first since the German Gerhard Rohlfs in 1879, to make the arduous journey to the strategically significant Kufara Oasis. Her book The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara, which recounted the tale of that expedition, during which she pretended to be an Arab woman called Sitt Khadija, turned her into a celebrity, with The New York Times heralding her as “an Englishwoman… young and fair to look upon, with a story of hardihood, suffering and narrow escape from violent death in the strange places of the world.” But her sidelining of Hassanein in that account led to significant criticism from a number of reputable figures including Bell (who dismissed her with the line, “in the matter of trumpet-blowing she is unique”).

Trying to know quite where to place one’s sympathies in the Forbes-Hassanein controversy is an interesting matter. From one angle, she’s the Western imperialist treating the Egyptian as an underling; from another, she’s the woman who is derided for trying to claim credit that should belong to a man. This interplay of the privileges of class and nation versus the constraints of gender is one of the things that make Forbes such a fascinating figure to read.

Her own significant interest in women who refuse to accept conventional roles is given free rein in her book of travel essays Women Called Wild (1935), which brings together her encounters with women in dozens of locations, including Abyssinia, Russia, Dutch Guinea and China. There is a great deal of “the strange places of the world” in her manner of writing, as well as some fantastically told adventures, but at her most appealing she is a witty observer who is aware of the partiality of her own viewpoint, and the links between women from disparate parts of the world. (For instance, in Jeddah, when an Arab woman defends the right of men to hit their wives, she recalls a woman in Lincolnshire who believed her husband had stopped loving her when he ceased to beat her.) It isn’t that she feels the pull of sisterhood towards all women – anyone whom she deems “stupid” immediately loses her interest – but where she glimpses an independence of spirit she is entranced, even if (as often seems to be the case) the independence takes the form of expressing and acting on political convictions that are not Forbes’s own.

It isn’t hard to work out where this desire to know the stories of free-spirited women operating within patriarchal worlds comes from – although she is averse to claiming any limitations set on her by her gender. One of the most wounding events of her life, as told in Gypsy in the Sun, occurs when her husband overhears a well-known proconsul brush away talk of her achievements in reaching Kufara by saying, “I imagine the Egyptian with her must have got his quid pro quo.” What hurt Forbes is that this same proconsul, whom she greatly respected, had previously written to congratulate her on her journey, which he described as a “service to the Empire”.

Forbes’s ability to overlook political convictions in order to write with sympathy about those with personal characteristics she admires served her well in the matter of women, but it was a complete disaster when it came to men. Power was what most appealed to her in a man and in the Thirties this meant Hitler and Mussolini, both of whom she encountered on a number of occasions, and by whom she was clearly fascinated (not so Gandhi, who disappointingly sat on the ground eating celery when they met). She attempted to repair the damage this did to her reputation with a book of interviews, These Men I Knew (1940), asserting that she had merely reported political views that were abhorrent to her. But there’s no way of getting past the skin-crawling descriptions of her telling Mussolini’s fortune or of walks through flower gardens with Hitler who, she insists, had long forgotten many of the things he wrote in Mein Kampf by the time she came to know him. Small wonder that soon after war broke out Forbes left England and went to live in the Caribbean, where she died in 1967. Other than her two-volume autobiography, almost all the 30-plus books she wrote – novels, travel books, biographies – were written before the war.

It’s her travel writing, in particular, that deserves to be read. One of my favourite of all Forbes’s moments comes from Forbidden Road: Kabul to Samarkand (which, despite the title, begins in colonial India). In Peshawar, in the Thirties, she encounters two women in burkas. There are few things to make the stomach clench more than a Western woman writing about an encounter with a woman in a burka. But Forbes sees in the first woman “the privilege of anonymity”, and has this to say on the second: “I wondered if she enjoyed her privacy, if it amused her to be a secret in the publicity of Peshawar. She dawdled. She turned to look at me. I imagined she smiled, contemptuous perhaps of the freedom she had no desire to share.” It’s an entirely unexpected response. The moment when the covered Indian woman and Forbes look at each other – with one only able to imagine the other’s expression – stayed with me long after I read it. In fact, it compelled me to entirely transform the character of an English archaeologist in the novel of Peshawar that I had just started writing: Peter became Vivian, with the middle name Rose.